Shock of the News E-Book

Jonathan Miller

• Herausgeber: Gibson Square
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

'[An] insider's account.' Ian Burrell, i-Paper'A bare-knuckle read.' Andrew NeilRazor-sharp and wity, Jonathan Miller pulls back the curtain on how Murdoch won and lost the media crown, and why this is important for the looming AI revolution in this rollicking memoir. Rupert Murdoch's tech guru and disruptor-in-chief, Jonathan was also the founder of UK's first news site, a war reporter in Kosovo, and commentator on the follies of both France and rural Britain. Bound to amuse and spark debate, including why wokism is not news!

Leseprobe

1 ‘I’m not interrupting you—am I?’

Murdoch’s Magic Mountain

Where to commence my troublemaker elegy? So much trouble to choose from. The memory of one misadventure melds into another. But one of my biggest escapades of all was as a chief mischief maker for Rupert Murdoch, in his time the global bad boy and king of disruptors. So I’ll start this story at his house in Los Angeles.

At his mansion named Misty Mountain in the Santa Monica Hills, Rupert Murdoch was having a cocktail party. I am in the garden, admiring the view, sneaking a cigarette, and looking for a flowerpot to conceal the butt. Rupert hated smoking. He once caught me having a ciggie and remonstrated, ‘Stop that. We need you alive.’ That was him in one of his transiently charming moods, as when he used to phone me, always in search of gossip, and started the call by asking, ‘I’m not interrupting you, am I?’

Murdoch’s mansion was not on the scale of La Cuesta Encantada, William Randolph Hearst’s castle 250 miles north in San Simeon, the model for Xanadu in the film Citizen Kane. Hearst’s estate was big and beyond vulgar, with its 165 rooms, imported treasures, three guesthouses and a garden of 127 acres on a bone-dry rock. Misty Mountain was restrained in comparison, and much more liveable. With only 22 rooms, set in a garden of six acres, in Spanish colonial revival style, vast windows, sweeping vistas, it was a billionaire’s mansion, but it oozed taste and Hollywood glamour as well as power.

Murdoch buys and sells houses like he trades wives and Misty Mountain was then his favourite, a symbol of his new status in the film industry. The house had been designed by Wallace Neff, architect to Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin. Built in 1926 for film director Fred Niblo, who later went broke, it was then bought by Hollywood tycoon Jules Stein, in a bidding war with Cary Grant. Now it was Rupert’s. He was the King of the Hill.

Triumphant in Los Angeles, New York and London, his eyes now on China, Murdoch was at the apogee of his power. He had built an empire upon an empire. Its humble beginnings: a daily in South Australia that he had inherited, aged 21. Now, 40 years later, in 1993, he was master of all he surveyed. He was the Charles Foster Kane of the time. I am here because the monarch of media was entertaining his preening myrmidons, of whom, at the time, I was one. We were all dressed in what we imagined to be our best L.A. evening wear. I had rushed out to the swanky shops on Melrose Avenue that afternoon to find something suitable.

Rupert was married to Anna Torv at the time, a woman who can only be described as forgiving, for it certainly wasn’t easy being married to Murdoch. A former journalist, she met Rupert at the Daily Mirror in Sydney, a paper he’d bought in 1958, an early trophy on his march to world domination. News Corp. executives from around the world were in the throne room—living room being too modest a description—angling for some face time with the monarch. I’ve never been one for crowds, so I stayed outside. And I’d already had plenty of face time with the boss.

Rupert had convened a technology week on the 20th Century Fox Studio Lot and there were executives present from many divisions across News Corporation. Our conference was supposed to be the forge of the future. We had spent two days listening to invited outside experts pontificating on their inchoate visions of the future. I recall a consultant from McKinsey, spouting forth and splattering slides on the wall. A man from Apple was there, touting a complicated and primitive personal digital assistant called Newton, which went on to become a giant flop, although it ultimately inspired the iPhone.

A movie lot is maybe not the place to take hard decisions about the future. Everything was surreal, a fantasy. I’d wandered onto the sound stage of Hill Street Blues the day before and was amazed at its authenticity, it was exactly like a real police station in New York! Until I brought myself up short because the only notion I had about what a New York police precinct should look like, was from watching Hill Street Blues.

Rupert was the tycoon’s tycoon in a world about to become digital. He was bemused. What was about to hit his newspaper and television businesses that bestrode the world? Indeed, the newspaper boys had not even been invited to his tech shindig. Rupert had smashed the Fleet Street unions and ridden the satellite wave to create Sky in its wake. But the potential and consequences of the internet were eluding him.

I was at that time seen as one of the gurus on all things technological and was invited to lunch with Rupert at the studio commissary after the conference. I met him at Building 88, the old executive building. There was no computer on the desk in his office, when I’d stopped by for our date. We walked to lunch where we were attentively served. He was his charming self but didn’t seem entirely present. To me it felt like a potential job interview to the empire’s future….

2 Shock of the News

Adieu El Vino—1986

Shortly after joining TheTimes, I was taken by colleagues to the Town of Ramsgate, which is not in the town of Ramsgate but next to the Thames at Wapping Old Stairs leading down to the river in east London.

The Town of Ramsgate public house is where Times journalists hung out during the Wapping dispute, while the mob of printers and their friends besieged the gate of Rupert Murdoch’s nearby newspaper fortress. The traditional journalists’ pub, El Vino on Fleet Street, had been abandoned, colonised by solicitors.

I was getting a crash course in British newspaper lore. I’d just joined the paper, new cannon fodder arrived from America in the battle to free the British newspaper industry from the tyranny of the printers.

Did I know the best dateline ever filed, asked Tim Jones, one of my new colleagues? I was straight off the boat, metaphorically, and confessed ignorance.

There are twin shapely peaks in the Ezulwini Valley of Eswatini in Southern Africa, he told me, known to the locals as Sheba’s Breasts. Finding himself in this happy valley, a correspondent for the Guardian cabled, ‘Between the breasts of Sheba—I like it here.’

Where journalists gather, the banter is to be taken with plenty of scepticism. The Eswatini story is what’s known in the trade as too good to check. So I did check and it’s true. It was used as a dateline in 1964 by journalist Arthur Hopcraft in a report for the Guardian.

This was the end of an era, and the start of a new one. The Fleet Street memorialised by Evelyn Waugh, in his quintessential newspaper novel Scoop, was coming to an end. Rupert had ripped out its heart. The Times and the Sunday Times had been on Gray’s Inn Road, not far away, but the Sun and the News of the World were at News International’s Bouverie Street premises in the heart of the newspaper district. With these premises abandoned in the bolt to Wapping, the old Fleet Street entered a death spiral. Goldman Sachs would soon buy both the Telegraph building and the Black Lubyanka building of the Daily Express. Reuters would leave for an office tower at Canary Wharf, to be replaced by Freshfields lawyers.

Fortunately the siege of Wapping was usually fairly porous, and business at the Town of Ramsgate was brisk as we snuck out for lunch. Keir Starmer, I subsequently learned, was among the volunteer legal advisors protecting the civil rights of the pickets. I imagine him freezing on the Wapping Highway outside the fortress, while we tucked into our pork pies at the Town of Ramsgate. We didn’t know it at the time, but our smug complacency was ill advised. The computers that came for the printers would soon come for us. We couldn’t even imagine that something called the internet and artificial intelligence would be threatening us all with obsolescence, too.

The Town of Ramsgate is the only pub I know that has a Papal blessing behind the bar, inscribed by the Vatican calligrapher, and attested by the seal of the Pope himself. The Pope supposedly thought he was blessing the actual Town of Ramsgate in Kent, 150 miles away. That was the story, anyway.

If back then it was the dawn of a new era for journalism, these times are ancient history now. Not even the jokes have stood the test of time. Would you be allowed to file such an intro as Hopcroft’s to today’s Guardian? Breasts present the immediate problem. Maybe between the chests of Sheba? It would all be angrily crossed out by a gender-neutral Zoom generation subeditor, working from home. That’s if sub-editors (copy editors in America) even exist anymore. Best to avoid the subject altogether.

Newspapers—the dead-tree press—are irrelevant now, 40 years later, sad to say, as an ink-stained child of the press myself. You rarely see anyone reading a newspaper, even on a train. W.H. Smith has abandoned the high street. Who wants ink all over their hands? I’ve hardly bought a paper in years. I have my iPhone, more powerful than the computer that sent men to the moon. On its screen the once-glorious mastheads of famous newspapers are rendered in pixels, not print.

Many fewer trees are being felled, at least. Since I got in the game, circulation has collapsed (I’m not solely responsible). The Sun sold 3.6 million copies in 1990, maybe sells 1.2 million now. The figures are no longer disclosed. From embarrassment, without doubt. The Daily Mail has gone from 2.3 million to less than a million. In the United States, the Chicago Tribune, Los AngelesTimes and Washington Post have all lost more than half their circulation. Newspapers are now mainly websites. The print edition is an afterthought. ‘Digital first’ is the rallying cry.

In 1871 Henry Morton Stanley, commissioned by the New York Herald, tracked the missing, presumed lost David Livingston to Ujiji near Lake Tanganyika, in what is now Tanzania. ‘Doctor Livingston, I presume,’ was the takeaway quote. His discovery was a sensation on a scale no longer conceivable, in our world of 15-minute news cycles and algorithm-driven information streams.

‘You provide the pictures and I’ll provide the war,’ William Randolph Hearst, proprietor of the New York Journal, ordered a photographer, at his megalomaniacal peak. The Spanish-American War duly ensued.1 Hearst became the model for Citizen Kane, the 1941 movie directed by and starring Orson Welles. ‘Mr. Carter, if the headline is big enough, it makes the news big enough,’ says Kane in the film.

It’s the most classic of numerous movies set in the milieu of newspapers, when they mattered.2

Lord Northcliffe’s Daily Mail shaped the development of aviation, and nurtured the industry that would win the Battle of Britain, with his colossal-at-the-time £10,000 prize for Alcock and Brown’s transatlantic crossing in a Vickers Vimy bomber, in 1919. (Although they crash-landed in an Irish peatbog and the American Charles Lindbergh, who made the first solo flight in 1927, got the subsequent glory.) He also wasn’t shy picking battles, deposing Lloyd George during the height of the Great War.3 ‘News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising,’ he said.

The Daily Mail was selling a million copies a day at the start of the 1920s and twice that by the end of the decade. ‘Never pick a fight with a man who buys ink by the gallon and paper by the ton,’ said Mark Twain, an author now cancelled in many schools.

All gone. The cacophony of Remington typewriters in the newsroom has been silenced. Nobody is shouting ‘copy’ or sending cables at night press rate. The spike has surely been banned by health and safety.

I was in Detroit not long ago, where I once worked, visiting the site of a future inner-city horse-riding centre, Detroit Horse Power, where local activists are aiming to transform a derelict wasteland into an urban equestrian park. It is modelled on the Ebony Horse Club in Brixton, London. It’s a project that combines my passion for horses, with my hopes for a revival of Detroit, where I learned so much about journalism.

It’s counter-intuitive to go on holiday to Detroit, as I did. But it’s instructive. Detroit still has many problems but nearly 50 years after the riots made it a dystopia, the once-great city is showing signs of life. Ford has restored the magnificent Union Station. Woodward Avenue looks smart. The downtown streets are clean. There are restored buildings, and flowers in the centre of the boulevards. Gucci has opened a boutique next to the old police headquarters, my old stomping ground. There are some very good restaurants. My Uber driver was from Lomé, Togo, driving a smart, impeccably clean Suburban SUV of which he was very proud. We spoke French. Je l’aime ici, he said. So Detroit is becoming a land of opportunity for some.

Out in the now less-densely populated neighbourhoods of Detroit there are urban farms where destroyed houses have been removed and the land restored. People are growing vegetables and fruit. A lot of the remaining houses are being improved. Braver bourgeois families are returning from the suburbs. There’s good coffee. With a respected mayor, Detroit has little of the systemic corruption that plagues rival Chicago. There’s a vibe of Brooklyn, Michigan. To live in Detroit is no longer dire, it’s cool.

But then I visited the soulless DetroitFree Press newsroom decanted to a nothingburger downtown office tower, and it was a different story, of decline and fall.

When I started my career at the Free Press, the newsroom was a volcano. Not now. All but two journalists were WFH. They only bother to print the paper three times a week. Otherwise it’s just another website, focused largely on the city’s sports teams. Look on the Detroit Free Press and despair. The city’s coming back, the newspaper isn’t.

Detroit was an important step on my road to Wapping. It’s the city where I got a taste of big-city newspapering while it still existed, a city that was then on its knees after riots, depopulation and deindustrialisation, a wonderful city to be a journalist. But the Detroit Free Press, the beloved, pesky, unpredictable Free Press, is a shadow of its former self, rotting away to irrelevance under the dead hand of its current owner, the Gannett Company.

I will insult Gannett frequently in this book, because it deserves it, and also as a proxy for the awful corporate media groups that have presided over the decline of newspapers in the United States and United Kingdom. It’s a decline entirely attributable to the failure of newspaper publishers to stake out their place in a future in which people no longer read newspapers on the train, but watch TikTok videos on their phones. Newspapers are represented on the internet, it’s true. But they are nowhere close to being as influential on the digital platforms as they used to be in print. Their journalism isn’t compelling anymore against riotous competition. Some of the best young journalists work elsewhere.

Gannett owned 250 newspapers in America by 2019 and it would be hard on any given day to pick up any one of them and declare it a great read. The newspapers are purely a product, standing for nothing. Its flagship national USA Today is the newspaper equivalent of a McDonald’s hamburger. A read of last resort in the airport departure lounge. Some of the journalists try, but much reads as if it’s written by an especially obtuse robot. Gannett boasts of its ‘compelling content, events, experiences and digital marketing business solutions.’ At Gannett they hold meetings where they conjure up such gibberish, they don’t hold the Front Page.

Gannett’s style of squeeze-until-the-pips-squeak media ownership is not just an American problem. In Britain its wholly-owned subsidiary Newsquest controls more than 200 media brands, including 150 local newspapers such as the Oxford Mail. Dire is aptly descriptive of most of them. I feel sorry for the young journalists who are condemned to work there. Hopefully they will make their escape.

The death or might-as-well-be death of almost all printed newspapers was inevitable but the carelessness with which newspaper publishers surrendered their position is a disheartening story. Newspaper owners were supremely confident. In the seventies groups merged and consolidated in the supposed interest of efficiency, but shareholder value and bonus options were really the priority of management. The papers may not have been as good as they used to be but the profits were fat.

Then the internet arrived in the eighties and nineties with the newspapers’ management hardly noticing, or noticing too late. They finally paid attention when the business started falling apart. They were behind the curve at every step. Classified advertising disappeared to Craigslist and eBay,4 or to local free sheets that dispensed with journalism altogether.

Newspaper publishers had no strategy or even understanding of the changes occurring around them. Their belated response was manic and confused. Newspapers started giving their content away online, thinking that advertisers would like it. But advertisers were finding other routes to the consumer that were cheaper and less wasteful. Some belatedly put up pay walls; the New York Times and the Financial Times with great success, many others with poor or indifferent results, there being so many competing distractions online. And some, including the Sun, were still floundering between the two in February 2025, making some content free and demanding payment for other material frustrating readers either way.

The great replacement of newspapers by digital news isn’t finished. Only a handful of newspaper titles will survive in this crowded, disrupted market. The London Evening Standard, long reduced to a free sheet, closed in 2024 (re-emerging as a ‘new’ entity, the London Standard). More than 500 American dailies have closed since I entered the game. Many of those clinging on are now so dire they don’t deserve to survive. It’s not just newspapers but print generally that has seen sales collapse. My favourite newsagent on Berwick Street in Soho, London, tells me that sales of once-thriving magazines like Hello! are down by 50 per cent.

We foresaw none of this at the Town of Ramsgate. We thought we were the future but were instead the last of the Mohicans.

3 The art of trouble

Did I ever use a typewriter? Mother’s milk. Upright manuals, bashed to bits. We typed ‘the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog’ to test that every letter was working. Cut and paste meant exactly that—1969

I arrived at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor from London in the summer of 1969, aged 17, hopelessly naive, admitted despite the absence of most of the normally required academic qualifications. They waived me in only because my father had just been appointed a professor at the medical school. He’d had enough of the NHS, even then. A place for me was a perk of his job.

I was initially reluctant to follow my family to Michigan. But I was a teenager and confused. I’d been at Bedales, a progressive coed boarding school in Hampshire, where I was noisy and a terrible student. I subscribed to the Economist on the school rate, hid in the library, wrote a few pieces for the student chronicle, sneaked off to the Good Intent public house in Petersfield, where they were not fussy about age, and tried to stay awake in lessons. I recently wrote a rude piece about the school for the Spectator and suspect I am now persona non grata there. I wasn’t interested in A-levels and didn’t get any.

London at the time was supposedly buzzing, decreed to be ‘swinging’ by Time magazine. It was true that London had a photogenic and groovy counter-culture. Jimi Hendrix played the Albert Hall, the Rolling Stones played a gig in Hyde Park. But Time’s story was what is known in the trade as a confection, bearing only an incidental relationship to the broader truth. Away from Bárbara Hulanicki’s hip Biba boutique and the anarchic bazaar of Kensington Market, later demolished, the site now a branch of PC World, England was in fact rotting. This was the tag end of Harold Wilson’s Labour government. The winter of discontent, the OPEC oil crisis and IMF bailout soon followed.

It was the height of the Vietnam War and I demonstrated outside the American embassy in Grosvenor Square, immersed myself in silly teenage politics, and hung out with friends at music gigs in grotty clubs in Camden Town. I was very left wing at the time (I got over it, eventually) and ran into Peter Mandelson when he was the commissar behind some demo of the day. He was extremely arch and very bossy. I didn’t like him, indeed took against him instantly. We were to meet again much later, in Brighton, in an incident I will explain later, when I provoked him into a spectacular hissy-fit.

It’s true there were girls with Union Jack mini skirts on the King’s Road in Chelsea, but outside the privileged postcodes London was also a tired city of endless grime. They were still clearing remaining bomb sites. People in Cricklewood were living in prefabs.5 There’s a documentary on YouTube, a tour of North London with the suave actor James Mason,6 disabusing the Swinging London narrative. He talked to bums, showed us the miserable offerings of the market traders, filmed navvies huddled around their braziers.

Withnail and I,7 which began in squalid Camden Town, was another accurate portrayal of the zeitgeist. But the narrative was Swinging London. The ‘easy listening’ song England Swings8 by Roger Miller, was a hit in 1965 in both Britain and the US, and I knew it wasn’t true.

None of what was happening in London suggested I could make a living there. University would have been the alternative but I had no qualifications, having become perfectly alienated from school. My economic prospects in Britain were zero. I thought I wanted to be a journalist but didn’t have a clue what I had to do to become one.

So I made the move to America. It was like being promoted to Club Class, from grotty, steerage England. Eventually I got a chance to return to Britain, during the government of Margaret Thatcher, when you didn’t have to put your watch back 20 years when you landed at Heathrow. But the move to America was the great escape.

I said goodbye to London friends, all heading to universities, and left Britain. I took the BOAC bus from the Victoria Coach Station and flew firstly to Bermuda to visit a school friend whose family had grown wealthy selling rum on Front Street. Then, via La Guardia, on to Detroit airport and then Ann Arbor where the sky was blue and it was blazing hot.

The young and ambitious state of Michigan had implanted in Ann Arbor a university with the mission of becoming the Athens of the Midwest, and it had succeeded. The University of Michigan, founded in 1817, had become one of the best in the world—still is, 18th in the 2025 reputation ranking of The TimesHigher Education Supplement. President Kennedy launched the Peace Corps from the steps of the Michigan Union.

The university was especially strong in engineering, medicine, science and literature, profited from a generous alumni and boasted the nation’s best college football team. Also, and this was my personal nirvana, there was the Michigan Daily student newspaper. Here is where I transformed from a directionless exile, vaguely but inconclusively drawn towards journalism, into a cadet journalist. It was like winning the lottery.

Ann Arbor, known by the locals as ‘A2,’ was nothing like grimy London. It was a shady, prosperous bubble in Midwestern America, the enormous university and its hospital at the centre, surrounded by concentric circles of student housing, the smarter neighbourhoods where the professors lived, and the ranches on the outskirts, petering out to rural Michigan to the north and west, and blending into industrial Ypsilanti, the two big airports to the east, the giant Ford plant where they’d built Liberator Bombers, and then farther still, Detroit and the Canadian border. The University of Michigan dominated the city with 40,000 graduate and undergraduate students.

In its academic cocoon, Ann Arbor was (and still is) one of the most affluent and privileged places on earth but it was also (and still is) a hotbed of extreme politics, ultra-left at the time, now radical identitarian, all about pronouns, Palestinianism and critical race theory.

The year 1969 was the end of the Age of Aquarius, the theme song of the rock musical Hair. The Ann Arbor police had a special radio code—605—as a shorthand description of a hippie. I grew my hair over my shoulders and wore bell-bottom jeans. We must have looked ridiculous.

After London, buses and tubes, Ann Arbor was another world. Kids had cars. They would lend them to you, just like that. Insurance? No problem. Everything seemed enormous, even the food portions in restaurants. The girls were gorgeous. But riot police with shotguns were protecting the administration building.

The horrors of Vietnam and the draft permeated everything. More than 200 American soldiers a week were being killed. Campus politics were passionate and revolutionary and so was the music. Iggy Pop and the MC5 were the town bands in Ann Arbor. The MC5 didn’t get a lot of airplay with their hit song, ‘Kick Out the Jams, Motherfucker.’ The sound was angrier than it had been in London.

Ann Arbor was the birthplace of the radical-left Students for a Democratic Society, which was to morph into the terrorist Weather Underground. Just before I showed up, the local recruiting office of the Central Intelligence Agency had been bombed. It wasn’t a huge bomb. Nobody was hurt. It was more of a fuck-you bomb.

The prime suspect was Pun Plamondon, a prominent member of John Sinclair’s White Panther Party, although he was never charged. Plamondon died in 2023, Sinclair in 2024,9 self-exiled in Amsterdam. The White Panther Party used the rainbow flag as its battle standard, not yet a symbol of gay liberation, and campaigned for dope, sex and rock and roll, all abundant in Ann Arbor at the time. It wasn’t clear what they would choose, if you offered them two out of three. The White Panther Party no longer exists. Its radicalism has been replaced on American campuses by wokism.

I suppose I never attended more than a couple of dozen lectures in my four years in Ann Arbor and don’t recall taking a single exam but many of my professors gave me passing grades anyway and the university never got around to throwing me out. Instead of going to class I immersed myself in the Daily. The student newspaper was a pillar of campus life with a reputation as a greenhouse for aspiring journalists. This was the deus ex machina for me. The Daily was my miracle. I was lost, then saved. For the next four years, I spent practically every day in its newsroom or out doing stories. Nobody taught me journalism. I learned by doing it.

The Daily was owned by the university but written and independently edited by students. It had no connection to the journalism department. It was independent also of the student government, unlike captive student publications in Britain. Nothing resembling at all the American college press has ever existed in Britain. We published six days a week and had news, opinion, arts and sports pages. A student business team sold classified and display advertising. The paper cost a dime and we sold thousands a day. Editors were paid $50 a month.

The newspaper occupied a magnificent Art Deco building near the centre of the campus, designed by Albert Kahn, the architect laureate of Michigan. He was also the architect of the Detroit Free Press building, the iconic Fisher Building in downtown Detroit and more than 1000 factories. An Associated Press teletype machine clacked away in a corner. There were dilapidated steel desks with battered manual typewriters. We wrote our stories on rough copy paper and then cut and pasted with scissors and glue.

We were certain the Daily was the best student newspaper in America if not the world and may have been right. We saw all the others, which came in the mail on exchange, and none had our verve. We were proud that the Daily was a constant irritant to the university, which was powerless to curb it, even though it tried.

We had our own composing room and printing press so the Daily building had a pervasive smell of newsprint and ink. On the ground floor was a bank of hot-metal linotype machines that produced type a line at a time from molten lead. The printers would assemble page forms out of lead castings which were then used to make the drums for the letterpress printing machine. The newsroom was upstairs and had a great vaulted ceiling. There was a sign over the sports desk announcing Revolutionary Vanguard Elite. There was a nickel Coke machine at the top of the stairs.

I wasn’t the editor, I was considered by my colleagues something of a wild child, but by my senior year was head of features. I launched a daily page one news and gossip column, called Today. Its mascot was a squirrel, the signature creature of Ann Arbor. The Daily was also where I met Mrs Miller, who had aspirations to be a journalist before she succumbed to the law. When we met she fell off her chair, but the chair was defective like much of the furniture.

I could basically do anything I liked. I took myself to Montreal after the kidnapping of James Cross, a British diplomat and Senior Trade Commissioner, who was abducted on October 5, 1970 by members of the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ). During the 1972 presidential election, I wormed my way onto George McGovern’s doomed campaign, travelling on the press bus with gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, who covered the campaign for Rolling Stone under the rubric, ‘Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72.’ He seemed to be the only reporter on the bus to burst the balloon. “How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?” he wrote.

He wasn’t at all as he came across in his supercharged pieces. He was mild-mannered and polite, but a tortured soul who ultimately killed himself.10 The campaign taught me a lot about political journalism, or rather journalists. These campaign journalists were the subject of a funny but excoriating book by Timothy Crouse. ‘Pack journalism is not the result of a conspiracy; it is merely the result of the reporters’ natural desire to write what everyone else is writing,’ he concluded.

What struck me was the media hierarchy. The superstars were R.W. ‘Johnny’ Apple of the New York Times and David Broder of the Washington Post. Then came the ‘national reporters’ from the news magazines and the ‘name’ newspapers and newsmagazines like Newsweek, the Boston Globe and Chicago Tribune. They were at the front of the campaign bus with the television network journalists. Then came the ‘locals’ in the middle like the Milwaukee Journal, and finally the squirts like me in the back.

I could see how this pack of journalists was driven mad with its self-importance. Everywhere we went there were crowds and police and secret service. The journalists basked in the attention, imagining it was all for them. And they were partly right. A gaggle of journalists descending on a small town in South Dakota is by itself a spectacle. I was thrilled by this, of course. But later I realised that this pack journalism was hackery, an exercise in groupthink. And every time I have seen a press pack since, this is confirmed in the inevitable huddle as the journalists agree the ‘lede,’ or ‘intro.’

The campaign helped me learn that it is more rewarding to hunt alone than in a pack. So I chased stories all over the state. Stole the trash from the administration building to read the papers of the university president. We got a couple of good stories out of it. (‘Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail,’ said Henry Stimson, Herbert Hoover’s Secretary of State. Reporters aren’t gentlemen. Surely this should be standard tradecraft for a journalist, like reading upside down the papers on the desks of people you interview.) When an eco-gang started vandalising billboards on the side of Michigan highways, the police were baffled. Daily photographer Andy Sachs and I found out who was responsible and we did an eyewitness story watching them destroy a notoriously hideous jumbo billboard advertising Christmas decorations.

There was much sexual entanglement11 among the staff of the Daily and subsequently numerous marriages. This was before Aids and young people apparently going off sex altogether. A Venn diagram of who had sex with whom could be reconstructed and I think by now more than 50 years later, most of us would laugh. Our children and grandchildren have no idea what we got up to. There were histrionics and tantrums. We would argue into the night over the front page layout. We did mad things, throwing the paper’s support behind the first Ann Arbor hash bash, a celebration of cannabis, which became a campus tradition and continues at the university even now, after 54 years. I don’t think we were ever dull.

My contemporaries at the Michigan Daily went on to great things. Eugene Robinson became a columnist for the Washington Post and won a Pulitzer Prize. Fred LaBour, whose piece for the paper claiming that Beetle Paul McCartney was dead12 became a national sensation. He changed his name to Too Slim and became a successful country singer-songwriter. Tony Schwartz went to New York where he was hired by Donald Trump to ghostwrite The Art of the Deal. It was a great deal for Tony. Trump offered him half the royalties, which eventually amounted to millions. Patricia Bauer worked as an editor at the White House and then for the Washington Post. A near contemporary, Tom Hayden, a former editor and a founder of Students for a Democratic Society, won fame as one of the Chicago Seven, a group of activists charged with conspiracy and inciting a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. His conviction was overturned on appeal. Walter Shapiro ran unsuccessfully for Congress13 before going on to become a Washington political pundit who covered 12 presidential election campaigns before dying just before Donald Trump’s victory in 2024. It would have broken his heart. A Democrat to his bone marrow, he was pals with Joe Biden and much of the Democratic establishment. His wife Meryl Gordon (they met at the Daily) is a literary biographer who teaches journalism at New York University.

I click on the Michigan Daily website from time to time and it is sad what it has become, as feeble as so many of the other formerly great newspapers that it once sought to emulate. It has descended into the pit of publishing trigger warnings on its articles and promoting the cult of transgenderism. It carries no dissenting voices. There’s no fun. There’s little evident curiosity and much stenographic reporting. The Daily has even hived off a supplement for black students, called Michigan in Color. The Daily is now segregated! The lead story when I glanced at it recently: ‘UMich commemorates international day for the elimination of racism with theatre performance.’

In media content analysis, what isn’t covered is often more revealing than what is. When the University hired the biggest DEI (diversity equity inclusion) team in American academia, it entirely escaped the attention of the Daily. I still have a few friends on the faculty. They tell me stories of turmoil within the university faculty and administration of which the Daily is entirely unaware. Like much of the once well-regarded American college press, it is mainly a website now. A very poor website, it should be noted. There’s no interaction. Minimal innovation. They’ve sold off the presses and hired a contract printer to produce a weekly paper. It’s embarrassing. Trite writing. A shit show. Woke, woke, woke. Weak, weak, weak.

When I passed by the Daily on my last visit to Michigan a couple of years ago, in search of lost time, the building was locked. It never had been before. No longer at the centre of campus life, the once proud Daily has literally and metaphorically shut the door and has become the butt of derision. The jokes make themselves. ‘The Daily’